Flames defeat rescuers at Spanish rail crash
Flames from a blazing Spanish passenger express that had crashed head-on with a freight train prevented rescuers from getting to trapped passengers.
“I saw horrible scenes,” said Juan Carlos Garcia Morate, who witnessed the accident from his home and was one of the first to arrive at the scene last night.
“I saw people in the buffet car holding their burnt hands out of the window and screaming ‘help me, help me’, and I couldn’t get close to them ...I can’t forget that image,” he said today.
Rescuers and forensic experts searched through the twisted, smoking wreckage of the collision that left at least 19 people dead.
Another 40 people were injured, the state-owned rail company Renfe said, but most were treated and released.
The locomotive and first few cars of the Talgo passenger train caught fire after the crash with a freight train near Chinchilla in Albacete province, 155 miles south-east of Madrid.
Renfe president Miguel Corsini said indications are the accident was due to human error, saying the signalling system in the area was checked and shown to be in order.
The passenger train, carrying 86 travellers and a crew of four, was apparently allowed to proceed south out of the Chinchilla station when it should have been diverted to a side track to let the freight train by, Corsini said.
When the station chief realised his error he phoned ahead to try to avert the crash, Corsini said.
Television footage showed flaming cars piled on the tracks. The freight train’s engine was hurled over the top of the passenger train by the impact.
Three large cranes took up positions along the track to try to lift the freight train.
“I saved myself because I was in the toilet at the moment of the collision,” said Nieves Pinto, a woman passenger,.
“I reeled from side to side. When I tried to get out to find my husband there was a tremendous fire, everybody was screaming,” she said.
AP
